Putting the ING in Leasing

A gilded landmark once owned by Helmsley-Spear, 230 Park Avenue offers two features prized by New York office tenants and commuters alike: great views and the relative ease of working near Grand Central.

This isn’t to say that all of those who work in finance live in New Canaan or Scarsdale. But 230 Park Avenue, and Midtown in particular, has always been favored by the kind of high-net-worth financial and legal tenants who, besides committing to 10-year offices leases in Manhattan, sign pricy residential mortgages on tree-lined suburban streets across Connecticut and upstate New York.

Ahisgett. (Courtesy Flickr)

To change the make-up of 230 Park Avenue to make it more tech-friendly would be a short-sighted view. The floor-plate sizes, the transportation needs of those who work in 230 Park Avenue, even the close proximity to similar (and competing) kinds of firms—it all plays well to blue-chip companies, according to the building’s owner.

“Building’s don’t move,” said Monday Properties chief operating officer Brian Robin, whose firm has owned 230 Park Avenue since 2007. “One building at 46th and Park is not going to change its personality to try and be more suitable to a Midtown South client base.”

That’s because the Helmsley Building is, well, the Helmsley Building. It has the “unavoidable advantage” of being the Warren & Wetmore-designed building with the trademark cupola that is just steps from Grand Central and the financial center of Midtown Manhattan. Conversations with Monday Properties execs give the sense that the firm knows that the bread-and-butter tenant of 230 Park Avenue has historically been, and most likely always will be, financial and legal firms.

Which is why the global financial firm ING, and all its various affiliates, has spent the past 30 years occupying and growing inside 230 Park Avenue.

Earlier in April, ING signed a 10-year lease for 10,500 square feet on the 18th floor for ING Investment Management International, a division of the financial firm.

With that deal, the Holland-based ING now has approximately 229,510 square feet of usage spread over six floors throughout 230 Park Avenue. It has 55,000 square feet apiece on the 12th and 13th floors, 55,540 square feet on the 14th floor, and 43,820 square feet on the 15th floor.

Its two smallest spaces are on the highest and lowest office floors: 9,650 square feet on the ninth floor, and now its latest office space on the 18th.

With each space, those at Monday Properties said, ING has designed its offices to be both banker- and eco-friendly. Each floor can accommodate typical banking functions with trading areas, open-plan areas, large meeting facilities, and technology-intensive meeting and conferencing facilities.

The firm has also spent a good deal of money transforming its offices into LEED-friendly spaces, Monday Properties told The Commercial Observer.